ALTOONA, Pa. -- Convenience-store chain Sheetz Inc. recently announced that it is planning to invest an additional $15 million to boost wages for store employees this year. So what does this mean for Sheetz workers?
In a Q&A with Adam Sheetz, director of store operations, The Triad Business Journal asked why Sheetz is planning to increase the wages of store workers by 5% to 10% based on years of service and position.
Q: Why is Sheetz raising store employee wages now?
A: We have always tried to stay on the high end of wages in retail. We continually monitor the market. Other retailers have been in the news, raising wages lately, and that caused us to look at where we were. We needed to make some adjustments if we wanted to stay out front. Some of our competition has been reducing employee hours, which in turn reduces an employee’s chance to get health insurance. We are actually moving toward a more full-time work force. We want to offer as many full-time retail jobs as we can, and I think that is pretty rare in retail right now.
Q: What’s the benefit of a more full-time work force?
A: Those employees deliver much better service to our customers. They stay with us longer. They are engaged and on board with what we are trying to do. So we started pushing toward full-time in stores.
Q: What will this wage increase mean for workers?
A: We took them up to a $9 starting salesperson wage, which goes to $9.50 after six months. Our lowest entry-level management position, which we call a shift supervisor, went to $12 starting, from $10.50 or so. You’re continually eligible for tenure-based increases in those positions. We took the average starting pay of an assistant manager up by over $5,000 per year. It went from about $32,000 to $37,000. So those were the positions where we felt like we needed to make an adjustment.
Click here to view the complete Q&A.
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